From navigating multiple rounds with doctors and pharmaceutical companies in 2020, when no one was willing to test its product, to securing a Central Drug Standard Control Organisation licence and achieving commercialisation in 2024, BrainSight AI has made significant progress.
By enabling neurosurgeons to map brains more precisely and interpret MRI scans efficiently — especially as the world grapples with mental health challenges — BrainSight AI earned the Top Innovator award at the ET Startup Awards 2024. This was BrainSight’s second shot at the award, after it emerged runners up in 2023. This year the clinical recognition along with commercial launches made it the jury’s favourite.
Also what resonated the most is the company’s entry into clinical psychiatry, a major emerging sector in the country and world over.
Founded by Laina Emmanuel, an engineer, and Rimjhim Agrawal, a PhD in machine learning for psychiatry, the company is now poised to generate business revenues as it enters the commercial phase. The Bengaluru-based startup wants to scale the deployment of its product from around nine hospital groups to 100 with 30 to 40 cases being analysed a month by the end of the year.
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Currently, the startup primarily helps doctors detect cases of brain tumours, but slowly it is moving into analysing brain images for patients suffering from Parkinsons, stroke and other such medical conditions.“For us the beginning was almost like a trial by fire because it was the time of the pandemic and doctors with whom we needed to work very closely had pushed everything on the back burner other than fighting Covid-19,” Emmanuel told ET.
But access to grants at the right time, adoption by a few enterprising doctors and support from early investors Stanford Angels and Entrepreneurs, InfoEdge and She Capital, helped the fledgling startup survive and build itself as a deeptech company in the healthcare space.
“We are now nearing the close of a fresh funding round, which will support our (US) Food and Drug Administration (FDA) licence application and fuel our expansion into new hospitals and medical departments,” said Emmanuel.
While the company is working with neurologists, it has received inbound interest from the psychiatry departments at large hospitals who want to test the software for their use cases.
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Looking back at her journey, Emmanuel said there were key decisions she made: bringing in the right cofounder, Agrawal, through an entrepreneurship programme, and securing timely grants that supported them during the testing phase of the product.
“We hired someone specifically to apply for grants worldwide, and the assurance that approved funds would reach our bank account allowed me to invest my personal funds into the startup as credit for the business, which was a significant advantage,” she said.
Brainsight AI had secured grants from the government-backed BIRAC (Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council) in 2020. Overall, the startup has raised close to $ million through venture funding and multiple grants from India and elsewhere.
On the hardships of building a deeptech startup in India, Emmanuel emphasised the need for incentives for doctors to engage in research and stronger collaboration between private investors and the government to support early-stage deeptech startups. “The Singapore government has a programme where, if a major investor conducts due diligence and commits 15%, they provide the remaining 85% of equity funding. Such initiatives could be highly beneficial in India,” she said.
As the company focuses on commercialisation, Emmanuel is confident it can reach a $100 million annual recurring revenue run rate by scaling across India and expanding globally.